


Home Again

by Sunshine170



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen, s5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-21 06:57:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1541741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunshine170/pseuds/Sunshine170
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It  still stands – broken, crumbling, ravaged… it still stands – witness to two decades of ruination, the loss of everything, a life she’d known once…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Again

She walks through the house slowly, every step measured, halting as she takes stock of the surroundings. The dust smarts her eyes, burns her lungs as she breathes it in, inhaling the acrid smells of plunder and decay.

She ignores it.

The house still stands – broken, crumbling, ravaged… it still stands – witness to two decades of ruination, the loss of everything, a life she’d known once…

It bears no resemblance to the one she left behind that morning, 21 years ago when she’d walked out of the door leaving behind the jagged broken parts of her family, the man she loved, the memories they’d made, the traces of the child they no longer talked about – the toys that never got put away, a sweater she found in the machine the other day, the pictures that still stared back from the walls.

The only home she’d ever known, thought of as her own, loved fiercely … now nothing more than walls that refused to fall, a condemned building that would someday face a demolition truck and be obliterated.

Like it never existed, like they’d never lived…

_I wanted to remember things. I don’t know. I just wanted to be there. It made me feel closer to you…_

_Did you remember?_  She should have asked, Olivia thinks as she walks up the stairs. The fifth step still creaks.

It almost makes her smile…almost.

Did she remember… the sound of her little feet on wooden floorboards  as they raced from one place to the other, never still, never not noisy, the swing set in the yard, the nook  beneath the stairs where she would hide when she was upset at them. The nursery her father built for her with his own two hands, the gossamer lace curtains that hung on the windows of her room.

Bare feet in the grass on summer days when they played catch in the yard and in the winters…when they built snowmen in the freezing Boston cold.

Did she remember the piano Peter played for her, while she sat on his lap and listened, rapt with attention.  The nights of thunderstorms when she crawled into bed with them and clung tight to her.

_Did you remember when this was a different place Etta…do you remember how happy we were?_

_Did you remember… how much I loved you?_

The necklace rests in the crevices of her palm, the infinitesimal weight of the bullet so heavy, it feels like a stone on her chest.

_I figured it had to be important, or you wouldn’t have kept it._

What strange comfort did her daughter get from this piece of lead, Olivia wonders, what made her keep it so close to her heart.

Did Etta look at it and think of her, imagine the stories it could tell, know somehow that this souvenir of violence was the reason they both died and lived that day so many years ago.

Or did she keep it because it was the only thing she could find in these ruins of their family life, the one thing that wasn’t looted or broken.

The bullet that saved the world…

 _“I wanted to tell you about it someday…”_  she whispers to no one, standing in the middle of a destroyed nursery, a shattered relic of her daughter’s childhood, her eyes drinking in the carnage of her motherhood.

_“I wanted to tell you so many things…”_


End file.
